


Song to the Siren

by Delphi



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Drama, First Time, Luxury, M/M, Seduction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-08
Updated: 2012-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-15 22:21:30
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,390
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/532401
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Delphi/pseuds/Delphi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>The first time, he resisted.</i> Severus is seduced in the grey winter days of wartime.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Song to the Siren

The first time, he resisted.  
  
He could claim it was a show of character. For all his multitudinous sins, the corruption of youth had never been among them. In truth, however, (and why not a little truth, for novelty's sake) Severus was motivated primarily by suspicion.  
  
And rightly so. He had retired to his rooms directly after dinner on a winter's night, eluding Alecto and Amycus, and proceeded to his bedroom, only to find it unexpectedly occupied.  
  
"Good evening, Headmaster."  
  
The boy was lounging on the bed in an artfully careless pose, slouched against the pillows with a mint cigarette dangling between two fingers. He was wrapped in his cloak, a wine-red and ermine affair that likely cost more than most young men's entire wardrobes, and by the glimpse of bare leg effected by the bend of his knee, Severus could surmise that he was wearing little or nothing underneath.  
  
"What do you think you're doing in here?" Severus's hand was already upon the hilt of his wand. The lock on the door hadn't been broken. His private wards had shown no signs of tampering.  
  
But then, Blaise Zabini had always been an apt pupil.  
  
Blaise leaned over and put out his cigarette against the silver case that lay open on the night table. It, like the boy himself, was sharply out of place in the tarnished clutter of Severus's bedroom. The surface of the night table was nib-scratched and dusty where it wasn't covered by a stack of books and empty teacups, and though the rumpled bedclothes appeared suggestive under Blaise's handsome sprawl, Severus knew the bed simply hadn't been made for a week.  
  
"What do you think I'm doing in here, sir?" Blaise smiled a familiar smile. Severus had been privy to its evolution in recent years, and finally, it seemed to have been perfected into an expression that clearly said: _Isn't life tiresome? And isn't it a nice coincidence that both of us are clever enough to see it?_  
  
Blaise's knee bent further, and the cloak slipped down, exposing his leg to the thigh.  
  
Severus was forced to swallow hard, and his own expression grew more dour at the humiliation of it. Which side had sent the boy? He could not even guess. The family were old blood and old wealth—purists, but apolitical.  
  
"I think, Mr. Zabini," he said, "that six and a half years of tolerable behaviour have earned you one act of leniency. Whatever you have come here to steal or glean or extort, you may leave without, and count yourself fortunate."  
  
Blaise Zabini had it in him to kill in cold blood, of that there was no doubt. If he were here to assassinate him, it would not be out of righteous zeal, no—but there were other, even more compelling reasons to commit murder. Money, power, fame. It was, in a way, reassuring to know that there were still Slytherins in whose ambitions he could take pride.  
  
"I'm not a thief or a spy. Or a blackmailer," Blaise said, although he only sounded offended by the first two allegations. He settled back against the pillows, looking as though the conversation were already boring him. "I thought it would be interesting to sleep with my head of house before leaving school."  
  
"Then turn your attentions to Professor Slughorn," Severus said sharply, annoyed that the child thought his head would be swayed with so little effort. "I'm certain you'll have more luck with him."  
  
Blaise wrinkled his nose. "It wasn't the office that attracted me."  
  
"Get out," Severus said, his patience reaching its end.  
  
The lamplight caught the boy's dramatic cheekbones just so as he tilted his head to the side. One elegant finger followed the seam of the cloak, parting it fully.  
  
Severus's gaze lowered, drawn down against his will. The boy was exquisite: smooth skin over lean muscle. His shoulders were broad enough to mark him as more youth than child, and there was an effortless grace to the inviting angle of his thighs. His sex, half-hard, stirred further under Severus's attention.  
  
It meant nothing. There were potions. The boy was eighteen.  
  
"Get out," he said again.  
  
Blaise only smirked. His hand trailed teasingly down his stomach.  
  
Something drew tight inside him, pulled to the breaking point with the weight of hunger and frustrated desire and sickness to the death of trying to save those who, not content with the danger they were in, insisted on courting it further.  
  
"Get _out_!"  
  
He charged forward and seized the boy by the collar of his cloak, dragging him off the bed. Blaise twisted, righting himself nimbly and extracting himself from Severus's grasp.  
  
"If you were busy," Blaise said, straightening his cloak with an insouciant little shrug, "you might have just said."  
  
Then he sauntered out with a swish of his cloak, seeming not to feel the chill of the stones beneath his bare feet, leaving Severus with a headache in his wake.  
  


* * *

  
  
The second time, Severus compromised on coffee.  
  
He blamed the dull ache at his temples, which had persisted since the boy's first appearance two days prior. Sleep was a rarity these days, and he was subsisting on cold tea and his personal hoard of stimulants. The first measure of ease occurred when he entered his rooms—the new wards as undisturbed as the last—to be greeted by a curl of steam and the bitter aroma of arabica.  
  
The bathroom door was ajar. Severus approached warily. The steam grew thicker, the heat irritating his skin and the humidity lingering in his nose and lungs. He pushed the door open and peered inside distrustfully.  
  
Blaise was naked in the bathtub, the water up to his chin. He was too tall for the tub, one leg bent and the other dangling over the side, inviting the eye in between. He looked up with one eyebrow raised in idle interest, and the fingers of one hand fanned in a small wave. The surface of the water held the distorted sheen of bath oils. Juniper and cypress, Severus thought, breathing it in.  
  
The boy's skin glistened like silk, and Severus's hands twitched.  
  
"What are you doing here?" he asked tiredly. "I thought I made myself clear."  
  
"I came back for my cigarettes," Blaise said.  
  
Severus's eyes were drawn down the long leg overhanging the edge of the tub. The boy's toes were lazily curling and uncurling.  
  
"So you decided to help yourself to my bath."  
  
Blaise frowned. "Are you aware that the seventh year dormitories only have _showers_?"  
  
He said this as though the bathing accommodations—and not, say, the infiltration of Death Eaters—were the most egregious failing of the school to date.  
  
Severus turned his back on him and went out into the sitting room. The sound of displaced water made his shoulders tense. He examined the cafetiere upon the table. Then, weighing the likelihood and consequences of poisoning, he poured himself a cup.  
  
"It's good," Blaise said from behind him. "My mother sent it from Florence."  
  
A glance over his shoulder revealed the oddly perturbing sight of the boy in Severus's own dressing gown. He wore it well, as he wore everything well. Blaise's hands lingered at his waist, adjusting the belt.  
  
"Florence," Severus echoed. The boy would join her there if he were half as clever as he thought he was. "Will you be going for Christmas?"  
  
Blaise stole a cup and filled it, then sat down at the table. "No, there'll be time for that later. I'll be taking the grand tour after sitting my NEWTs."  
  
Severus didn't reply. He closed his eyes and took a sip of the rich brew, and then he sat down as well.  
  
"Have you any recommendations, Headmaster?"  
  
He frowned. "I beg your pardon?"  
  
"For my tour." Blaise pursed his lips and blew steam off the top of his cup. "I thought you might be able to recommend an interesting diversion from the usual itinerary."  
  
Severus raised an eyebrow.  
  
"As my former head of house," Blaise amended.  
  
At first, Severus did not reply. He drank his coffee and gazed down at the table. Then, against his better judgement, he said, "Leningrad. Saint Petersburg now, I suppose."  
  
The memory of snow dusting the Winter Palace wisped through his mind, silver to the dull lead of a bitter December in Hogsmeade. It seemed almost inconceivable that he himself had once been eighteen years old, abroad in the company of exotic friends, with the world sprawled before him, full of promise and grand ideas. The image of Igor followed; Igor, dead now, and all the more fortunate for it.  
  
"Saint Petersburg," Blaise mused. He sounded legitimately pleased, as though it were an answer he had not expected.  
  
He stood, that pleased little smile lingering upon his lovely lips. He placed one hand on the table and the other on Severus's neck. Then he leaned down and kissed him.  
  
Severus closed his eyes, and for a moment, he allowed it. The boy's mouth was warm, and his breath puffed softly against Severus's upper lip—catching as if in pleasure, or startlement at his own daring. Most likely it was feigned, but it was prettily done.  
  
Blaise's skin was as smooth and hot as he had imagined it: delicate under Severus's fingertips as he drew a slow caress from the curve of an Adam's apple to the place where the dressing gown closed.  
  
The boy shivered.  
  
Severus hesitated, breathing in deeply—smelling juniper and cypress and coffee—and then he turned the palm of his hand to Blaise's chest and gently pushed him away.  
  
"Put your clothes on," he said firmly, "and go back to your dormitory."  
  
Blaise drew back obligingly. His head tilted to one side, his eyes narrowing, cat-like.  
  
"Yes, Headmaster," he said, obedient as any student Severus could have wished for, and he slipped the dressing gown off, leaving it to slither into a threadbare pile on Severus's lap, before recovering his robes and seeing himself out.  
  


* * *

  
  
The third time, even a good man might have conceivably surrendered.  
  
Of course, even at the heart of all these desperate machinations in this assuredly doomed year, Severus was nothing resembling a good man.  
  
There was no clever escalation to the boy's persuasion, no declarations or dramatics. He was merely there at the end of a day fraught with tedium and mild horror, sitting on Severus's sofa with a book in his lap and two glasses of scotch before him on the coffee table. The scene was that of a mediocre painting retouched in patches by an expert hand. Amidst the dingy grey of his familiar rooms was the spill of a wine-red and silver cloak over the armchair, and the warm amber glint of firelight through good liquor, and the handsome composition of velvet robes and keen-edged cheekbones that was Blaise Zabini.  
  
"Good evening, Headmaster," Blaise said, glancing up from his reading. He had helped himself to Severus's copy of _The Dragon Corpus_.  
  
"Go away, Mr. Zabini," Severus said. He could summon no heat to the words. His mouth felt ashen, and his hands were cold.  
  
Blaise set down the book, his long fingers sliding along the leather spine in a parting caress. "All right," he said, "but I'll have to take my scotch with me. It's twelve-year-old Glen Hogg."  
  
"Have you ever considered a career in politics?" Severus asked drily.  
  
"I thought about pursuing a profession," Blaise said reflectively, as though that hadn't been a slight. "Managing the family holdings is a full-time job, though, and my mother has borne the responsibility long enough."  
  
Severus sat down beside him on the sofa. He picked up both glasses and poured a little from one into the other and back again. He wasn't particularly suspicious of being dosed; bad scotch could hide much, but twelve-year-old Glen Hogg was transparent. Nonetheless, it was an object lesson. Switching glasses was for amateurs.  
  
"You should reconsider," he said. "You'll find it tedious, and then..." The scotch proved delicious, sliding smoothly down his throat. "...then you will be dangerous."  
  
Blaise smiled. It was a genuine smile, almost sweet, and Severus remembered what it was like to be eighteen and so rarely understood.  
  
"Then entertain me, Headmaster."  
  
The boy took a sip of his scotch, seeming to savour it—his eyes falling half-shut and his pink tongue swiping over his lush lower lip in it wake. Then he set the glass down and, in a swift and graceful movement, swung astride Severus's lap.  
  
The warm weight of him was like a belt of good drink to the belly. The boy's arms came around Severus's neck, eliciting gooseflesh with the brush of velvet and the press of hot skin. Severus felt himself stir, a rush in his loins the likes of which he had not felt in months, perhaps even years.  
  
"Why do you persist in this folly?" Severus asked, his gaze flickering over golden-brown eyes and the dark sweep of long eyelashes.  
  
Blaise kissed him softly, a mere cajoling.  
  
"Because it amuses me."  
  
Another kiss, lingering this time.  
  
"And because it's wicked."  
  
The flicker of a tongue, and then a teasing retreat.  
  
"And because..." Blaise murmured against Severus's lips, "...I'm hedging my bets."  
  
Severus tensed, his hands upon the boy's hips. Blaise did not meet his eyes; he was too clever for that. He looked down instead, and in the firelight, his expression could have been one of a hundred beautiful things. Cunning, perhaps—or demure—or affectionate.  
  
Blaise opened the front of his robes and took Severus's hand in his own, drawing it inside. "Why do you persist in letting me?" he asked.  
  
The last threads of Severus's self-restraint snapped delicately as his fingertips slid down the boy's naked abdomen. His hand thawed against the heat thrown between body and robe.  
  
_Why?_ he thought dizzily, feeling the boy harden in his grasp.  
  
There was no answer to that save for the taste of well-aged scotch on wet lips and the faint scent of expensive cologne, and the rub of silk and velvet against him as he pushed Blaise down upon the sofa and kissed him with all the cruelty of his own desperate hunger, and let him stay to warm his bed all the winter through like the last comfort owed to any condemned man.


End file.
